lets talk about the Confederate flag.

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The Confederate flag is one of those symbols that has recently taken a more negative meaning. Not sure when it happened or why. I remember in the 1980s watching the Dukes of Hazard and nobody thought anything of the "General Lee" and how the roof was painted. There is no way a network show would glorify the Confederate symbol like that today.

In the 1980s, the Dukes of Hazard were seen as lovable rebels. They were the heros of the show. Something happened since then to change the idea of what the flag stands for.

I used to think the flag was kind of cool because I liked the rebel connotations. Now I sense that the flag is more a symbol of racism and ignorance for most people and that is why it has been met with more and more distaste.

I am from the northern Midwest so I don't have an inside view on the south like some of you guys. Not trying to start a flame war but why is the CSA flag seen in such a bad light by most people today? What changed in the past 20 years? I am curious because I can remember a time when it was not only seen as a symbol of hate.

Not trying to start a flame war but why is the CSA flag seen in such a bad light by most people today? What changed in the past 20 years? I am curious because I can remember a time when it was not only seen as a symbol of hate.

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I suspect because today people actively look for things that hurt them and if they don't find anything, they make **** up. People will ALWAYS find something to whine about and stick a racist label to it.

The country today isn't what it was 20 years ago either. Pretty f'n sad!

I remember a Military man, who loved his country and fought for it. Afterward his country was poor and broke and being blamed for the War.
But he rebuilt his country, made it an Industrial power, gave the people jobs and their pride back. Helped them put food on the table. He also got their land that was stolen from them.
but that was Hitler.
Should Germans put Swastikas on their Volkswagens in honor of "German Pride"?

I remember a Military man, who loved his country and fought for it. Afterward his country was poor and broke and being blamed for the War.
But he rebuilt his country, made it an Industrial power, gave the people jobs and their pride back. Helped them put food on the table. He also got their land that was stolen from them.
but that was Hitler.
Should Germans put Swastikas on their Volkswagens in honor of "German Pride"?

I am from the northern Midwest so I don't have an inside view on the south like some of you guys. Not trying to start a flame war but why is the CSA flag seen in such a bad light by most people today? What changed in the past 20 years? I am curious because I can remember a time when it was not only seen as a symbol of hate.

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Because of the continued, creeping monopolization of private life by the federal state, which has been able to control the message and paint in inaccurate picture of what the CSA stood for and how it was different than what the federal state stood for. You should bear in mind that the 'north' didn't fight the 'south'. The federal government, with the support of the northern states, invaded the southern states. The first shots fired by the south were not aimed at "the north". They were aimed at the federal state. We're still paying for it to this day. This message has been controlled through state education for generations to where most have a completely inaccurate view of the 'civil war'.

Coincidently, I posted an article in another thread today that may help answer your questions:

In 1961 Life magazine invited the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren (author of All the King&#8217;s Men, and nineteen other novels) to record his thoughts on the meaning of the American &#8220;Civil War&#8221; on the centennial of that event. Warren responded with a long essay on the &#8220;symbolic value of the war&#8221; which was eventually published as a small book entitled The Legacy of the Civil War.

If Robert Penn Warren were to write this book today, he would be loudly condemned as an Enemy of Society (and a &#8220;Neo-Confederate&#8221 by all the usual defenders of the central state, from race-hustling &#8220;civil rights&#8221; activists to beltway &#8220;libertarians&#8221; and of course, the Lincoln Cult. For example, he wrote (p. 7) that in addition to slavery, there was a &#8220;tissue of causes&#8221; of the war, including the dispute over the constitutionality of secession, &#8220;the mounting Southern debt to the North, economic rivalry, Southern fear of encirclement, Northern ambitions, and cultural collisions . . .&#8221;

There were also economic causes of the war apart from slavery, Robert Penn Warren believed. &#8220;The Morrill tariff of 1861 actually preceded the firing on [Fort] Sumter, but it was the mark of Republican victory and an omen of what was to come; and no session of Congress in the next four years failed to raise the tariff.&#8221;

&#8220;Even more importantly,&#8221; Warren wrote, &#8220;came the establishment of a national banking system . . . and the issuing of national greenbacks . . . plus government subsidy [to corporations].&#8221; &#8220;Hamilton&#8217;s dream&#8221; of a large national debt was also realized, and &#8220;this debt meant a new tax relation of the citizen to the Federal government, including the new income tax&#8221; [introduced by the Lincoln administration for the first time].

&#8220;Out of the Civil War came the concept of total war,&#8221; i.e., the bombing, plundering, and mass murdering of civilians. In this regard, Warren quotes an 1862 speech by Lincoln in which he said, &#8220;The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present . . . . As our case is new, we must think anew, and act anew.&#8221; That is, &#8220;we&#8221; must abandon the law of nations with regard to the criminality of waging war on civilians, and &#8220;we&#8221; must abandon the U.S. Constitution as well, since it is one of the chief &#8220;dogmas of the quiet past.&#8221;

A major theme of The Legacy of the Civil War is that the war left the North (which is to say, the U.S. government) with &#8220;a treasury of virtue&#8221; (p. 54). This is the &#8220;psychological heritage&#8221; left to the North, and it is an insidious heritage, wrote Robert Penn Warren. &#8220;The Northerner, with his Treasury of Virtue, feels redeemed by history . . . . He has in his pocket, not a Papal indulgence peddled by some wandering pardoner of the Middle Ages, but an indulgence, a plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future . . .&#8221; (emphasis added).

Thus, this &#8220;treasury of virtue&#8221; would become the excuse for why the U.S. government would commence a twenty-five year campaign of extermination against the Plains Indians just three months after Appomattox; shamelessly rob the treasury for the benefit of railroad corporations; plunder the South for a decade after the war under the laughable guise of &#8220;reconstruction&#8221;; murder more than 200,000 Filipinos who opposed being ruled by the American empire after having escaped from the imperialistic clutches of the Spanish empire; and enter a European war that was none of our business to supposedly &#8220;make the world safe for democracy.&#8221; It was all done in the name of virtue, freedom, and democracy, or so we are told.

Robert Penn Warren called this &#8220;moral narcissism&#8221; (p. 72). It is &#8220;a poor basis for national policy,&#8221; he wrote, but is the &#8220;justification&#8221; for &#8220;our crusades of 1917&#8211;1918 and 1941&#8211;1945 and our diplomacy of righteousness, with the slogan of unconditional surrender and universal spiritual rehabilitation for others&#8221; (emphasis added).

Posing as The Most Virtuous Humans to Ever Inhabit the Planet requires that many &#8220;facts get forgotten,&#8221; wrote Robert Penn Warren. For example:

It is forgotten that the Republican platform of 1860 pledged protection to the institution of slavery where it existed, and that the Republicans were ready, in 1861, to guarantee slavery in the South, as bait for a return to the Union. It is forgotten that in July, 1861, both houses of Congress, by an almost unanimous vote, affirmed that the War was waged not to interfere with the institutions of any state but only to maintain the Union. It is forgotten that the Emancipation Proclamation . . . was limited and provisional: slavery was to be abolished only in the seceded states and only if they did not return to the Union before the first of the next January (p. 61).

It must also be forgotten, wrote Warren, that most Northern states &#8220;refused to adopt Negro suffrage&#8221; and that Lincoln was as much a white supremacist as any man of his time. &#8220;It is forgotten that Lincoln, at Charlestown, Illinois, in 1858, formally affirmed: I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.&#8221;

Thus, after so much history is forgotten, and much of the rest of it rewritten as a string of fairy tales, &#8220;the War appears, according to this doctrine of the Treasury of Virtue, as a consciously undertaken crusade so full of righteousness that there is enough overplus stored in Heaven, like the deeds of the saints, to take care of all small failings and oversights of the descendants of the crusaders, certainly unto the present generation&#8221; (p. 64).

Warren quotes the historian Samuel Eliot Morison as commenting that one effect of this Treasury of Virtue on his (Morison&#8217;s) native New England was that &#8220;In the generation to come that region would no longer furnish the nation with teachers and men of letters, but with a mongrel breed of politicians&#8221; obsessed with &#8220;profiteering&#8221; through their political connections.

Among other effects are that &#8220;the man of righteousness tends to be so sure of his own motives that he does not need to inspect consequences.&#8221; And, &#8220;the effect of the conviction of virtue is to make us lie automatically and awkwardly . . . and then in trying to justify the lie, lie to ourselves and transmute the lie into a kind of superior truth.&#8221; This, I would argue, is a perfect definition of so-called &#8220;Lincoln scholarship,&#8221; especially the Straussian variety.

Warren believed that most Americans are content with all of these lies about their own history, the results of &#8220;the manipulations of propaganda specialists, and their sometimes unhistorical history&#8221; (p. 79). For they &#8220;are prepared to see the Civil War as a fountainhead of our power and prestige among the nations&#8221; (p. 76). They have been good and brainwashed as obedient little nationalists, in other words, who place a very high value on the &#8220;prestige&#8221; of the American state as bully of the world.

This is yet another dire consequence of the war: Americans came to believe in Alexander Hamilton&#8217;s notion that the &#8220;prestige&#8221; of the state through its pursuit of &#8220;imperial glory&#8221; was a legitimate function of government. Limiting the role of government to the protection of God-given natural rights to life, liberty, and property became one of Lincoln&#8217;s &#8220;dogmas of the quiet past.&#8221;

I suspect because today people actively look for things that hurt them and if they don't find anything, they make **** up. People will ALWAYS find something to whine about and stick a racist label to it.

The country today isn't what it was 20 years ago either. Pretty f'n sad!

Not sure when or what caused the change but I think that people that view it as only a symbol of racism are idiots... It's a flag, one that represented people that wanted their own freedom and were willing to fight for it... I'm originally from the North (WI) and now live in the South (GA) and could really care less if people want to fly the Confederate Flag or not... It's water under the bridge and doesn't mean squat to me...

Could it have something to do with the fact that the last time people marched under that battle flag, they did so with the belief and intent that they had a right own human beings, the right to rape their property, the right to take their properties' offspring and sell it?

I'm not against people flying the flag, freedom of expression and all, but I have to doubt the sencerity of any protestations that the above rights and beliefs are supossed to represent good southern hospitality.

I remember a Military man, who loved his country and fought for it. Afterward his country was poor and broke and being blamed for the War.
But he rebuilt his country, made it an Industrial power, gave the people jobs and their pride back. Helped them put food on the table. He also got their land that was stolen from them.
but that was Hitler.
Should Germans put Swastikas on their Volkswagens in honor of "German Pride"?

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Hitler had nothing to do with the CSA, and last time I checked the CSA had nothing to do with genocide. the last thing we need is for gun owners to start getting bleeding hearts and crying about this nonsense, Some of us are the only sane people left. If anything the people who are *****ing should thank the CSA for bringing their ancestors to America, So they can sit at home today, smoke crack, and live off the gov't.

I remember a Military man, who loved his country and fought for it. Afterward his country was poor and broke and being blamed for the War.
But he rebuilt his country, made it an Industrial power, gave the people jobs and their pride back. Helped them put food on the table. He also got their land that was stolen from them.
but that was Hitler.
Should Germans put Swastikas on their Volkswagens in honor of "German Pride"?

Click to expand...

Actually, believe it or not, Hitler is highly regarded in Pakistan and parts of India. They love meeting Germans who, once they find out the reason, are usually very annoyed to say the least. Although comparing Hitler to the confederate flag seems deliberately inflammatory. After all, it was the North that won in large part due to a strategy of raping, murdering, and burning the homes of women and children in the south as their husbands and fathers were fighting union soldiers.

Could it have something to do with the fact that the last time people marched under that battle flag, they did so with the belief and intent that they had a right own human beings, the right to rape their property, the right to take their properties' offspring and sell it?

I'm not against people flying the flag, freedom of expression and all, but I have to doubt the sencerity of any protestations that the above rights and beliefs are supossed to represent good southern hospitality.

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that happened under the american flag also.and after the war durring reconstruction in the south. look at how not only blacks were trated in the north but also the irish,chinese,and others.

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